Blakes cry for a voice Essay

In the fourth stanza, Blake uses religious symbols to show how the structured religion of the Orthodox Church can destroy the love and joy within. The narrator finds that the gates to the chapel are shut, symbolizing the restrictive nature of organized religion. Blake alludes to the Ten Commandments when he describes the church gates as having “Thou shalt not” written across them. This demonstrates the constrained state that the church puts Blake in (Griffiths). Discouraged by the limiting statement on the gates, the narrator turns to the rest of the Garden in

“The Chimney Sweeper” (128): This version of the Chimney Sweeper is very upfront and saddening. The version that is presented in the songs of innocence is much more of a calm town and is not as straightforward, while this version is very short and to the point. In this version its very deep as the narrator basically just calls out the parents/church for doing these horrible things to the children. I really love all three stanzas of this poem because they all have a really deep meaning and Blake transitions through them very well. Reading this poem over and over I don’t know what to make of it other than it is an absolute horrible situation. I think it can be tied in to

The voice in this poem is one of pure happiness and innocence. In this state of joy, the infant is unaware of the world in which he lives and that awaits him. In these opening lines, we see Blake revealing the everyday modeling and structure that categorizes the world, but is absent in the simplicity and purity of childhood. The child has no name because joy needs no other name. Labeling and classification are products of organization and arrangement that the world uses to assimilate innocence into experience. Blake demonstrates that it is through this transition, that the virtue of child’s play is destroyed. Blake utilizes specific emotions such as “happy,” “joy,” “sweet,” “pretty,” “sing,” and “smile” to describe this uncorrupted state of being. There is no danger, darkness, or struggle for the infant. Instead, he exists in a care free state, free of guilt, temptation, and darkness. The birth of a child is celebrated by Blake and it stirs in us powerful emotions of peace, love, and hope.

Romanticism is described as the period across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, following The Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, that enlightened artists and philosophers developed and expressed revolutionary responses to injustices at the time. On such revolutionary was poet artist William Blake. Blake lived and wrote in England at a time when the Christian Church and Industrialisation held utmost power over people. The philosophic writer saw such values and attitudes as crimes against nature and human nature and sought to protest. William Blake, in his protesting works like Garden of Love and A Little Boy Lost, through the use of irony, sarcasm, aesthetic and metaphor, expresses concerns of corrupted 18th and 19th century Britons.

Children of a lower social rank were not fortunate enough to receive and education and instead were expected to learn nothing except how to master their given trade. In his poem, Blake implies that due to organized religion and society failing them, these working children were only free in their dreams. He writes about a dream in which an angel came to Tom Dacre and all the sweepers with a key and unlocked them from their black coffins. This symbolizes freeing the boys from their seven by seven holes that they were confined to each day. Once freed by the angel, the boys were no longer required to work and were free to roam and play in the fields similar to how the children of the middle and upper class had done. Enjoying their freedom, the boys, “wash in a river and shine in the Sun” ridding themselves of the soot that had become embedded in their skin as they soaked in the warmth of the sun (Blake 15-16). The angel then came to Tom and told him that “if he'd be a good boy, / He'd have God for his father & never want joy” (Blake 19-20). Tom’s dream acts as a tool for Blake to comment on the lack of involvement and help from the Church upon the failure to do their

They lament the ways in which the intense and harsh experiences of adulthood destroy human innocence while exposing the apparent weaknesses of the innocent perspective on life. “The Tyger,” for example, tries to confront the negative forces in life, while the innocent perspective is not even aware of such forces. These poems also question the inherent “goodness” of love and sexual morality by discussing them as effects of jealousy, secrecy, lust, and shame. In regards to religion, these poems focus much more on the institution of the Church, its role in politics, and its effect on society and the mind rather than individual faith. Blake believes that experience adds a layer to innocence that darkens its hopeful vision, while taking away from its blindness.

     William Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper” was mainly about the possibilities of both hope and faith. Although the poem’s connotation is that of a very dark and depressed nature, the religious imagery Blake uses indicates that the sweeps will have a brighter future in eternity.

Blake's poems of innocence and experience are a reflection of Heaven and Hell. The innocence in Blake's earlier poems represents the people who will get into Heaven. They do not feel the emotions of anger and

William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience are collections of poems that utilize the imagery, instruction, and lives of children to make a larger social commentary. The use of child-centered themes in the two books allowed Blake to make a crucial commentary on his political and moral surroundings with deceptively simplistic and readable poetry. Utilizing these themes Blake criticized the church, attacking the hypocritical clergy and pointing out the ironies and cruelties found within the doctrines of organized religion. He wrote about the horrific working conditions of children as a means to magnify the inequality between the poor working class and

Blake, in this poem, basically protests against three major institutions: the government, the monarchy, and the church. He makes his criticism of these institutions through generalization of three main figures during the period. The chimney-sweeper represents all the chimney sweepers, the child labourers of the contemporary London. Similarly, the handicap soldier represents all the injured soldiers who suffer. The harlot

Masterful poets can make the ordinary artful, find deeper meaning in simplicity, and draw hopeful conclusions from the darkest of events. William Blake is no exception to this, and his mastery of poetry becomes apparent in “A Poison Tree”, the best poem ever written. In this poem, Blake creates a masterful metaphor, strengthened by his use of simple language, sound devices, and choice of meter, conveying an impactful message at the end. The simplistic yet pleasant style in which Blake conveys an exceedingly dark message truly makes him the best poet.

In both of William Blake’s poems, “The Little Black Boy” and “The Chimney Sweeper,” an innocent-eye point of view portrays the stresses of society in an alternative way to an adult’s understanding. The innocent perspective redirects focus onto what society has become and how lacking each narrator is in the eyes of the predominant white culture. Each naïve speaker also creates an alternate scenario that presents a vision of what their skewed version of life should be like, showing how much their unfortunate youth alters their reality. From the viewpoint of children, Blake’s poems highlight the unhealthy thoughts or conditions in their lives and how unfortunate they were to be the wrong race or class level. These narrators were cheap laborers and were in no control of how society degraded them. Such usage of a child’s perspective offers important insight into the lives of these poor children and raises awareness for the horrible conditions children faced in the London labor force prior to any labor laws. The children of the time had no voice or platform on which to express their opinions on their conditions. Blake targets society’s lack of mindfulness towards the children using the innocent-eye point of view and illusions of what they dream for in life.

William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. He was not recognized during his lifetime and now is considered as a seminal figure and criticised over the twentieth and even this century. Blake’s strong philosophical and religious beliefs in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. Although he was from London he spent his entire life in Felpham.

The speaker in Innocence is a chimney sweeper, but the poem doe snot focus on him–it focuses on “little Tom Dacre” and his dream (Innocence, 5). Before it was shaved off, Tom had white hair “that curled like a lamb’s back” (Innocence, 6). The color white and lambs are symbolic of innocence and purity; even though his hair is shaved away, the goodness is still right below the surface. The subject of Experience is in stark contrast to Tom Dacre. The speaker of the poem is someone who is talking to the child, and they do not describe the chimney sweeper like a person. Instead, he is called “a little black thing” sitting in the snow (Experience, 1). Snow may be white like Tom Dacre’s hair, but it is also stark and inhospitable: it serves to make the soot-covered child stand out. Like Tom, this child was prepared to become a chimney sweeper; his parents dressed him in “the clothes of death” and taught him “to sing the notes of woe” (Experience, 7-8).

In order to condemn the materialistic society, Blake uses the irony of the Tom Dacre’s dream, the boy’s encouragement to a new chimney sweeper, and their hopeful beliefs. Tom Dacre dreams that the chimney sweepers are “locked up in coffins of black” (line 12) and have been happily set free by angels; ironically, the sweepers are joyful that they have freed oppression and gone to heaven. Children should not dream about death at such a young age. Blake emphasizes the insensitive society that would victimize children and allow them to feel this way. In order to comfort a new sweeper into a lifestyle of devastation, the speaker says, “Hush, Tom” (line 7) before he receives a haircut. The pitiful child speaker is living a miserable life and yet capable of comforting another child who is new to this